Cooling Singapore 2.0
Developing solutions to address the urban heat challenge in Singapore
Singapore has become warmer as a result of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global climate change. As a densely populated city state in the tropics, Singapore’s population, economy, and ecosystems are vulnerable to the negative impacts of further temperature increase.
Tackling such a complex issue, with implications for planning, energy, transportation, building, and patterns of consumption, must be based upon sound scientific knowledge, in partnership with governmental and industry stakeholders.
The interdisciplinary Cooling Singapore project aims to mitigate the UHI effect by furthering the scientific knowledge required for climate-sensitive design of the urban environment. The team seeks not only to improve residents’ comfort level outdoors, but ultimately, also to improve liveability and well-being of residents, and sustainability of Singapore as a whole.
In the current phase, the team will develop an island-wide digital urban climate twin (DUCT) of Singapore by integrating relevant computational models (environmental, land surface, industrial, traffic, building energy) as well as regional- and micro-scale climate models.
Building on work done in the earlier phase, the team will work closely with government agencies to explore heat effects of buildings, transport and industry. Finally, they will produce a set of climate-informed urban design guidelines based on research findings as a resource to planners and agencies.
The multi-institutional project is led by the Singapore-ETH Centre, in partnership with the Singapore Management University (SMU), Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), TUMCREATE (Established by the Technical University of Munich), National University of Singapore (NUS), and Cambridge CARES.
CARES and Cooling Singapore 2.0
CARES’ contribution to Cooling Singapore 2.0 will be in evaluating the anthropogenic heat emissions from industry in Singapore by developing energy models. Ultimately, these energy models will be fed into the Digital Urban Climate Twin. CARES will also be developing models to simulate the effect of potential mitigation strategies on the anthropogenic heat emissions from industry in Singapore.
In addition to Cooling Singapore, CARES and the Singapore-ETH Centre are also working together on another project to better analyse and therefore improve Singapore’s energy usage. This project is also developing a digital twin to model energy data for better city planning and policy frameworks.
This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme.